Peas

“I eat my peas with honey;

I’ve done it all my life.

It makes the peas taste funny,

But it keeps them on the knife.” – Anonymous

 

 

I’m the sort of person who hoards random leftover stuff in the toolshed because reasons. One reason is that they’re useful (wrenches). Another is that I use them a lot (screwdrivers). Yet another is that I know other people use them, so I’ve got one in case I need one (chisels).

Perhaps the most maddening reason is that there’s some stuff I have just because someone offered me it and I just couldn’t say no. Like the bench-mounted double grinder (I don’t have a bench) and a mitre box, when I think something might be cool or useful, it goes in the shed perhaps never to be used, but I’d rather have a tool that I might need than not have a tool I do need.

With data, there are just so many tools though ! Knowing which one to use is difficult at the best of times – they all do one thing very well and other things beside – and it sets off my anxiety just thinking about the range of possibilities.

Helpfully, there’s someone in the data community (isn’t there always) who takes it upon themselves to document all the available options to make chooosing a tools easier. In this case, it’s Matt Turck. Every year for the past five years, maybe longer, Matt has produced a handy infographic of the Big Data Landscape, accompanied by a very insightful blog which you should make a point of reading. This is the picture for 2016, and this is the one for 2021. Please take a look at them before reading further…

The thing that’s most striking about these images is how much more there is in the later one. The explosion in data and analytics over the last few years, coupled with the availability of more open-source software has led (in my view) to a bewildering array of options for data – so much so that it’s probably easier to stick with what you know.

Making the right technology choice for your thing is important. Making the right tooling choice for manipulating, moving, transforming, aggregating, tagging, reporting, analysing, and visualising your data is also very important. And just as hard, if not harder.

Imagine designing a system in a NoSQL datastore like Apache Cassandra, only to realise that reporting is *not* as simples as a SELECT * FROM table JOIN otherTable ON commonColumn, and you should really redesign your entire keyspace to get that kind of data materialised up front (please, no comments on the relative merits of Materialised Views in Cassandra – that can only end badly).

My point here is that sometimes a plethora of choices can lead to suboptimal decisions. Tooling for the data professional is not ‘When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything starts to look like nails’ – it’s a delicate balancing act between function and useability. Not everyone is going to know every tool. No one expects them to, except possibly recruiters, and nor should anyone denigrate one tool in favour if another to another potential user.

It’s a personal choice, unless your org has a specific toolset, but I’m guessing that most larger orgs won’t have one that covers all of the current tech stack (or if they do, it’s so out of date it’s not funny any more).

The choice comes down to whether you continue to eat peas with honey, buy a spoon, borrow a fork, or stop eating peas in the first place.

Back soon….

How to **** everything up

I originally wrote this back in September 2019 on another blog platform, but thought it worth reproducing here because 2020…

So, apropos of a complete breakdown in service, here’s a few handy tips and action points to make sure your legacy lives on in the most psychologically painful way possible.

They also have the useful side effect of demoralising your team so much that they actively consider leaving a good job and a great employer because they’re unchallenged, unvalued, and unheard.

1. When choosing a new technology for your product or service, actively consider how badly you messed it up last time, and seek at all times to replicate those ‘winning’ strategies.
2. Consider how the new technology can be bent to your will.
3. How will you hobble performance ?
4. How will you make your new design less resilient ?
5. What’s the lowest level of function that you can provide and could you push that bar even lower ?
6. When putting together your team, get the brightest minds and force them into scoping meetings that last for weeks but don’t actually have an output.
7. Getting money to do things is hard – always try to foster a ‘who will pay for this?’ mindset.
8. Embrace new ways of working, but only as far as they support and perpetuate your existing business practices – no one likes change.
9. If change *must* happen, make sure it’s delayed for as long as possible, but announce delays in small increments (or better still, not at all).
10. If your customer is important, make sure that everything is process-centric – consistent customer service is better than good customer service.
11. You’re a person outside of work – when you enter the workplace, don’t let on that you’re a functioning member of society.
12. Never ask a direct question – words mean far more than actions.
13. If buying a product off-the-shelf, make sure that customisations you implement mean that it can never be upgraded – you made it better, so that’s how it’ll stay. This is especially important if considering SaaS.
14. Ask your user community what features of technology they’d like to see, then implement policies or processes that mean those goals can never be reached.
15. In the event of your solution being accidentally viable, create management and authorisation frameworks so labyrinthine that people give up trying to request enhancements or alterations.
16. Remember, even a delivery of 10% of the promised functions equates to a 100% successful delivery.
17. Celebrate success with members of staff who had little or no input and who in all likelihood were not even aware of your project.
18. If you’re making progress, claim that one in front of senior management – your team is all behind you.
19. If you’re not making progress, micromanage. Two-hourly status calls are a great way to focus the team on solving problems and removing time-sapping blockers.
20. When preparing presentations, consider your audience. Put as many words on a slide as you can, and ensure each slide contains information on at least three unrelated topics.
21. When presenting, always stand behind your screen. Make sure to say ‘I’m not just going to read from the slide’ and then read from the slide.
22. Block-book 15-seater meeting rooms well in advance, then use them for 1-to-1’s every other week.
23. Bookend each workday with all-team meetings with titles like ‘DIARY-BUSTER’ and “ALL MUST ATTEND’.
24. Send those awkward ‘bomb-shell’ emails out of hours. Copy in as many people as you think might make it look important.
25. Above all, remember there is no ‘I’ in ‘Team’. There is an ‘I’ in failure, but that’s not an option.

 

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but hopefully they can help you be a better version of you if you’re into that kind of thing. Or you could just have read it, recognised some behaviours, smiled nervously, nodded sagely and moved on.

The decision, as they say, is YOURS !

Embracing chaos

A choice to be made

A long long time ago, in a city far far away, I made a decision that kinda changed my life in a big way.

Being slightly wierd about stuff and wanting to be free of the tyranny of choice, I threw out *all* my socks, and bought 12 pairs of identical black ones.

I was just at one of those stages of life where I thought that I was spending entirely too much time pairing socks after washing them. So, replacing all of them seemed like a good idea. “Any colour, as long as it’s black”, right ? And black goes with pretty much anything, right ? To this day, I only have 2 colours of socks (black and grey), and they are of different styles, so I can’t get them mixed up.

This only kinda changed my life. There was another incident a few years back that changed my perspective quite dramatically.

An epiphany of sorts

It was on a training course – 5 days of Sharepoint 2013 installation and configuration – and, as you might imagine, we tended to have long tangential discussions to relieve the tension and create a human bond in the classroom.

The instructor asked if anyone had any ridiculous rules to live by. I mentioned the sock thing, naturally…

And this is where the game levelled up dramatically. The instructor revealed that *he* had the *same* inclination when it came to socks, but his approach to finding a solution was so different, so radical, that it changed my life.

His theory was that, even with careful planning, socks wear out and need replacing, thereby introducing variation in foot attire that was almost, but not exactly, the same as the original problem – socks that don’t match and need to.

So he bought his socks online, in packs of three, that were *guaranteed* not to match. He was happier for bringing more colour into his life, and was still freed from the tyranny of choice – socks ain’t gonna match, so why waste time worrying about them ?

Life-changing times

Once you accept that there’s always going to be some variation in a given scenario (and also accepting that any variation has the capacity to drive you insane), perhaps embracing chaos is the way to go. It’s quite liberating to realise that there are certain elements you can’t control, but you can influence some elements that you have no control over by putting them in a ‘no control’ bucket. Let me contextualise that a bit more….

We’re rolling out Microsoft Teams to update our collaboration and promote new ways of working. Nothing to do with Skype For Business being sunsetted, no, nothing to do with that at all…

One question that comes up fairly frequently in the forums is the one about being able to delete chats – something that at time of writing we’re not able to do. We can delete individual comments, but the chat lives on. It just disappears off the ‘recents’ list.

If you’re the sort of person who likes a tidy mailbox and keeps everything in apple-pie order, I can see that this might cause some people ‘issues’ in the same way as socks did for me.

However, the persistance of chats and messages in a searchable log is a Very Good Thing. Hands up if you’ve ever searched emails or other electronic conversations for a half-remembered detail or needed to prove how a decision was made ? If the conversation had been deleted, there would be nothing to go search in and personally I’d spend quite a bit of time wondering if I’d just imagined something…

The fact that I can’t delete chats or messages in Teams is therefore in one of those ‘no control’ buckets – I accept that I can’t change it, but I know I can leverage the features that a lack of control actually brings by being able to search the archive. And that has to be a win.

What’s next ?

To be honest, I don’t know what’s next. There’s a lot of choice in the data world at the moment. So much choice that to some it’s daunting, to others completely overwhelming. Have a read of this blog, and tell me that the infographic doesn’t trigger at least *some* anxiety – how are we supposed to make architectural sense of that ?

Not sure, but I’ll be embracing that ‘chaos’ and looking for what it can deliver for me, my colleagues, and our services.

Thanks for reading.